Abstract
There is ample evidence that both native and non-native listeners deal with speech variation by quickly tuning into a speaker and adjusting their phonetic categories according to the speaker’s ambiguous pronunciation. This process is called lexically-guided perceptual learning. Moreover, the presence of noise in the speech signal has previously been shown to change the word competition process by increasing the number of candidate words competing for recognition and slowing down the recognition process. Given that reliable lexical information should be available quickly to induce lexically-guided perceptual learning and that word recognition is slowed down in the presence of noise, and especially so for non-native listeners, the present study investigated whether noise interferes with lexically-guided perceptual learning in native and non-native listening. Native English and Dutch listeners were exposed to a story in English in clean speech or with stretches of noise. All the /l/ and /ɹ/ sounds in the story were replaced with an ambiguous sound half-way between /l/ and /ɹ/. Although noise altered the pattern of responses for the non-native listeners in a subsequent phonetic categorization task, both native and non-native listeners demonstrated lexically-guided perceptual learning in both clean and noisy listening conditions. We argue that the robustness of perceptual learning in the presence of intermittent noise for both native and non-native listeners is additional evidence for the remarkable flexibility of native and non-native perceptual systems even in adverse listening conditions.
Highlights
There are large variations among speakers in how they produce sounds and words
The present study investigated the effect of intermittent noise on lexically-guided perceptual learning in native and non-native listening
We hypothesized that intermittent noise has a detrimental effect on lexically-guided perceptual learning, especially for non-native listeners, due to the detrimental effect of background noise on the competition process
Summary
There are large variations among speakers in how they produce sounds and words. This is due to differences in the speakers’ accent, dialect, speaking style, and idiosyncrasies of their vocal tract or, for instance, because the speaker has a speech impediment. One group of listeners heard /f/-final words where the final /f/ sound was replaced by the ambiguous [f/s] sound (e.g., witlo[f/s] - chicory). These listeners learned to interpret this ambiguous sound as an /f/, since the word witlof is an existing Dutch word while witlos is not. The other group of listeners was exposed to /s/-final words where the final /s/ was replaced by the ambiguous [f/s] sound These listeners learned to interpret the ambiguous [f/s] sound as an /s/, as the /s/-interpretation of the stimulus is an existing Dutch word while the /f/-interpretation is not (e.g., baa[f/s], where baas is a Dutch word (boss) and baaf is not). Retuning revealed itself in a subsequent phonetic categorization task, where listeners exposed to the ambiguous items in /f/-final words interpreted stimuli on an [Ef-Es] continuum more often as an [Ef] than the listeners exposed to the ambiguous /s/-final words, and vice versa
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